America's Homegrown Fascism

Yet again, Facebook proves an ample supply of various yahoos with their bizarre delusions.  I’d like to address many of these issues.

TRUMP = HITLER?  I addressed this before and will do so briefly here.  We managed to avoid descending into a fascist dictatorship under Trump.  Partly this was because Trump himself is far too lazy to be an effective dictator; the man has never worked a day in his life and doesn’t plan on doing so anytime soon.  Partly this is because, fortunately, most Americans don’t want a dictatorship.

LEFT-WING SUPPORT for DICTATORSHIP.   Somewhere along the line, the American Right Wing (ARW) decided that the Democrats and their fellow travelers were determined to give America a communist dictatorship.  Nowhere close to the truth and of course no evidence to support this.   What most Democrats would like is universal health care and a social safety net, and they don’t care how high the taxes would have to be to pay for it: they expect Mr. Amazon and Mr. Facebook to pay for it.  I can’t say I support that agenda, but it falls well short of Castro’s Cuba or Mao’s China. 

I can imagine a very tiny percentage of the far left wing who would be happy under a communist dictatorship provided they were the ones running it.  As a rank and file worker or peasant – or a prisoner in a gulag – they would be much less satisfied. 

RIGHT-WING SUPPORT FOR DICTATORSHIP.   Provided the dictatorship was nationalist and gave us all the trappings of traditional American patriotism, much of the ARW would be perfectly happy with a fascist dictatorship.   Presumably this dictatorship would enslave or eliminate Jews, blacks, Hispanics, gays, Asians, etc. any undesirable non-white people.  And these people would be content being rank and file workers and peasants under such a regime – so long as the regime got rid of all those aforementioned undesirables.   These people are far too stupid to recognize the irony of an “American dictatorship”.  The Founding Fathers worked their butts off in 1787 to make sure we didn’t wind up with another despot, which is what the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are all about.  “Right to be white” seems to be the only one these people recognize. 

BIDEN STOLE THE ELECTION.   Please.  Hillary Clinton was much more divisive and less popular than Joe Biden, so there was no reason for a Hillary voter to switch to Trump.  That being the case, Biden could expect to get at least as many votes and states as Hillary did.  Moreover, all the “battleground” states in 2020 were states that Trump won in 2016, so he’d have to win ALL of them to win his 270 electoral votes, and of course he didn’t.  And high profile Republicans endorsing Biden – and no Democrats endorsing Trump – likewise didn’t hint that Trump would win this time around.  Also, if the Democrats could steal the White House, they would also have arranged to flip close races in the Senate and take control of Congress.  But idiotic conspiracy theories are the basic bread & butter of the ARW.    

TDS.   Trump encouraged his Yahoo Army to storm the Capitol on January 6 to prevent Congress from certifying Biden as the next President.  He refused to concede the election to Biden and made various idiotic noises about the election being stolen – and 50+ frivolous lawsuits alleging theft with no support behind them.  Even his own attorney general, Bill Barr, told him these claims had no merit and he had lost the election. 

To the extent Trump has committed federal or state crimes he needs to face prosecution.   Bringing him to justice thereon is no more “Trump Derangement Syndrome” than the Nuremburg Trials were “Hitler Derangement Syndrome”. 

TRUMP & PUTIN.  I’m hearing some Trump supporters complain that Biden isn’t taken seriously by Putin and other leaders whereas Trump could deal with them as equals.  More idiocy.  Trump didn’t “deal” with Putin – in between blasting our own allies, proposing ending NATO, and other foreign policy missteps, Trump essentially gave Putin whatever the Russian leader might possibly hope to be a US foreign policy ideally calculated to favor Russian interests.   We should count ourselves lucky he didn’t turn over the “football” and CIA control to Putin. 

Trump epitomizes every vice and character flaw which Americans could possibly have and hold the office of President.  He embarrassed us in Europe and overseas to the point where foreigners actually felt sorry for us.  Trump was the Ugliest American.  You’ll notice that to the extent foreigners did love Trump, these were foreigners also loved Boris Johnson (UK), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), and other similar foreign leaders at the far right of the spectrum.  We think of the Ku Klux Klan as being a Southern institution in former Confederate states, but the Klan exists in former Union states as well, and even in Canada.  That being the case, I wasn’t surprised to learn that some Canadians love Trump too.  Whenever you have people willing to support quasi-fascists due to a misplaced concern about a nonexistent communist conspiracy, you’ll find enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump.  The smarter ones know and understand the difference between the North Korea which the dumber ones claim the Democrats want and the Sweden and Denmark the smarter ones know is the Democrats’ ideal for America, but still see fit to cynically support Trump anyway. 

There were cynics in the 1930s convinced that Stalin was bad enough to justify supporting Hitler.  In the US it was Charles Lindbergh, who pissed away the goodwill he earned as an aviator by jumping in bed with Hitler; and no one took him seriously after WWII, rightfully so.  How morally corrupt to do you have to be in 2021 – long after the Holocaust is common knowledge – to support a fascist agenda?  After US troops liberated Buchenwald in 1945, Eisenhower made it a point to bring local German civilians to the camps to see for themselves what was going on – and what these people disingenuously claimed they had no idea was happening.  Where did all the Jews go?  Hmm?  Looks like we found what’s left of them.  And even today you have people either denying this happened or even more provocatively, bark and bray that “six million wasn’t enough.”  These are your Trump supporters.  

CANCEL CULTURE.  Various private entities, like the Seuss estate and Disney, determined that some of their earlier work had some less palatable elements, and voluntarily withdrew these materials from public sale and domain.  This wasn’t the US government or state governments banning the items in question, but voluntary acts by private parties.  Naturally, the same yahoos who can’t recognize the inherent incompatibility of American patriotism with Confederate and Nazi flags, also don’t understand that “censorship” and the First Amendment only applies to government actions, not private parties or boycotts. 

MAINSTREAM MEDIA.  ABC, CBS and NBC are obviously slanted in the liberal direction, but there’s a limit to which they can portray the news to fit their agenda.  Moreover, we’ve had FOX for some time – and the Washington Times, here in the DC area – balancing out with a more conservative slant.  But even FOX isn’t inclined to abdicate wholesale to a President who summarily dismisses anything remotely unfavorable as “fake news”.  Once it became apparent that Trump expected everyone to make him look good, even news agencies such as FOX which might have been sympathetic to him found there was a limit to what they could tolerate.  That doesn’t mean FOX is lying to us if it reports anything unfavorable to Trump.  Dismissing the “mainstream media” as outright lies and fiction to be completely ignored altogether is yet another example of the consistent idiocy of the ARW.    

BLUE LIVES MATTER.  As I write this, the trial of Officer Derek Chauvin, accused of holding down George Floyd to the point where he died, is going on in Minnesota.  Chauvin has his defenders, remarkably enough.  Yes, there are people in the US who believe that no matter how egregious the police misconduct, the cops are always right.  Not more often than not or most of the time, but literally always.  Most of us remember in 1992 when a jury in Simi Valley, California, presented with videotape evidence of four LAPD officers beating Rodney King as he was on the ground and not resisting, acquitted them.  Mind you, both California and Minnesota were Union states during the Civil War, so former CSA states hold no monopoly on racism or this misguided worship of the police as infallible and completely unaccountable.  If you believe the police are right 100% of the time, bravo: you're a fascist.  

Fortunately for America, actual support for a fascist dictatorship is at the margin and not widespread.  Our latest candidate for dictator -  himself a fan of Russia’s dictator and contemptuous and rude to any foreign leader with any decency - was a lazy moron who couldn’t be bothered to leave the golf course long enough to be an effective despot.  We’ll see what criminal and civil actions emerge to bring him to account for his 4+ years of crimes, corruption and incompetence.  Stay tuned.